On stage at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit on Thursday, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos offered some perspective on Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley’s most controversial venture capitalist. “Peter Thiel is a contrarian, first and foremost,” Bezos said while in conversation with Walter Isaacson, the president and C.E.O. of The Aspen Institute. “You just have to remember that contrarians are usually wrong.”

Thiel, who sits on the board of Facebook and Y Combinator, among other jobs, ignited a fierce debate in Silicon Valley earlier this week when it was reported that he had donated $1.25 million to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Some called on Y Combinator to part ways with Thiel, prompting YC president Sam Altman to defend Thiel’s right to hold unpopular opinions. Facebook C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg also stood by Thiel’s board membership, remarking in a leaked internal memo, “We can’t create a culture that says it cares about diversity and then excludes almost half the country because they back a political candidate.”

Despite expressing faith that Thiel is wrong on Trump, Bezos said that he would have done the same thing. “It’s way too divisive to say, ‘if you have this opinion, you can’t sit on my board,’” he said onstage Thursday. “That makes no sense.”

A better solution? Send Trump into space, Bezos joked, referring to a similar wisecrack he made late last year. In December, Donald Trump sent a string of tweets criticizing the Amazon C.E.O., who in 2013 bought the Washington Post, for allegedly using the newspaper as a “tax shelter.” In response, Bezos fired back that Trump should be sent into space on one of Bezos’s Blue Origin spaceships. “Finally trashed by @realDonaldTrump,” Bezos tweeted. “Will still reserve him a seat on the Blue Origin rocket.” Bezos included the hashtag “#sendDonaldtospace,” along with a video of one of the rockets developed by his private aerospace company.

But Bezos also spoke seriously about the threat that the Republican nominee poses to American political institutions. “I don’t know how dangerous he is, because the United States is remarkably robust, but it is inappropriate for a presidential candidate,” Bezos said of Trump’s rhetoric. “When you look at the pattern of things, he’s not just going after the media and threatening retribution for those who scrutinize him. It’s also him saying he may not give a graceful concession speech if he loses the election. That erodes our democracy around the edges. These aren’t acceptable behaviors, in my opinion.”

In regard to sending Trump to space, Bezos quipped: “I have a rocket company, so the capability is there.”

Bezos also took the opportunity to talk about the Post. “I’m not there very often,” Bezos told Isaacson. “I have a day job—I tap dance into Amazon. I live on the other side of the country, literally. There’s a long tradition at the Post of just putting a lot of shoe leather into things. The Post is very lucky; it’s physically located in the capital city of the most important country in the world.”

Consumer privacy, too, was on Bezos’s mind. “One of the great issues of our age is going to be privacy,” he explained. “I would posit to you that any nation-state in the world could put a virus on your phone and spy on you.” But Bezos didn’t hesitate to share a few personal details with the Summit audience, nonetheless. Before he was a tech titan worth $70 billion, Bezos said he spent his childhood summers on a ranch with his grandfather watching the soap opera Days of Our Lives. Billionaires: they’re just like us.